1
What the words mean
Grant, scholarship, subsidised, unsubsidised, work-study, cost of attendance. Which ones are repaid, which are not, and which ones only sound the same.
Independent information
Understand the aid before you apply for it.
EDU Aid Network explains what student aid words mean, what each form actually asks for, and which office answers which question — so you arrive at the application already knowing what you are looking at.
Free to fileThe FAFSA costs nothing
One form firstMost aid starts there
School decidesNot us, and not a website
What you can learn
Three things worth knowing first
Plain English, no pressure toward any school or programme, and a link to the official source wherever the official source is the one that counts.
2
What a form asks for
The documents and figures commonly needed before you start, so that gathering them is a quiet afternoon rather than a scramble against a deadline.
3
Who answers what
Federal, state, school and private aid are run by different people. Knowing which office owns your question saves most of the time people lose.
The FAFSA is free. It is filed at
studentaid.gov and there is no charge to submit
it, correct it or re-file it. If a site asks you to pay to apply for federal aid, close
it. We are not that site and we never take payment details.
The order it happens in
A funding year, stage by stage
Dates move and rules change. What holds steady is the sequence — and knowing the sequence is most of what stops a deadline arriving as a surprise.
Before you apply
The part that is all gathering and reading, and the part people skip.
Work out what the year actually costs Start here
Tuition is one line. Cost of attendance is the whole figure the school publishes: fees, books, equipment, housing, food, transport and personal costs. Aid is decided against that number, not against tuition, so it is the number to find first.
Where it comes fromThe school publishes it, usually on the financial aid pages. If two schools quote very different figures, it is often what they include rather than what they charge.
Gather the documents before the form opens Ahead of time
Commonly: identity documents, prior-year tax information for whoever's details the form needs, records of untaxed income and benefits, and a list of the schools you want the information sent to. Exactly whose details are needed depends on your situation, and studentaid.gov is where that is set out.
File the federal form, free When it opens
The FAFSA opens for a given academic year and has both a federal deadline and far earlier state and school deadlines. The earliest of those three is your real one.
There is never a feeNot to file, not to correct, not to re-file for the next year.
Read what comes back, and ask about it After filing
What arrives is a summary of what was submitted, not an offer. The aid offer comes later and from the school. If anything on the summary is wrong, correcting it is free and is done the same way the form was filed.
Worth asking the aid officeWhether anything else is needed from you, and whether the school has its own form on top of the federal one. Many do, and many have an earlier deadline for it.
Compare offers on the same basis Offer season
Two offers are only comparable once you subtract aid that does not have to be repaid from each school's own cost of attendance. A larger headline figure at a more expensive school can leave you further behind.
Re-file every year you are enrolled Each year
Aid is not set once. Most of it has to be applied for again for each academic year, and household circumstances that changed are the reason to tell the aid office rather than to assume the figures carry over.
Better questions
Good decisions start from better questions
We do not tell anyone what they qualify for, because we cannot know and neither can any other website. What is useful is arriving at the aid office already knowing what to ask.
- What is the full cost of attendance for my programme, not just tuition?
- Which of this offer has to be repaid, and which does not?
- What are the state and school deadlines, as opposed to the federal one?
- Does this aid renew automatically, or do I re-apply every year?
- What happens to it if I drop below full-time enrolment?
Why it is written this way
Most of what makes this hard is vocabulary
Not arithmetic, and not the forms themselves. People lose time because nobody told them what cost of attendance covers, or that a state deadline can fall months before the federal one. That is the gap these pages are for.
Start with information, not pressure.
Tell us what you are trying to work out and a person will point you at the right guide — and at the official page, where that is the better answer.
Guides
Featured resource topics
A starting point before you open an official application or sit down with an aid office. Each one says where the authoritative version lives.
FAFSA preparation checklist
What to gather before the form opens, why accuracy matters more than speed, and the corrections process when something was wrong.
FAFSAGuide
Read more
Grant, scholarship, loan
A plain comparison of the categories, which are repaid, and why two offers of the same size can be worth very different amounts.
BasicsGuide
Read more
Cost-of-attendance planning
Looking past tuition at books, equipment, transport, housing and the costs that decide whether a year actually works.
CostsGuide
Read more